Search

If one saw a wrong being committed in public, should one intervene? This basic moral question is at the heart of a significant body of Muslim scholarship, and forms the topic of Michael Cook's eminently learned and comprehensive study.

In recent years, it has become very much easier to teach medieval heresy at undergraduate level.

Christopher Durston has produced here the sort of history which my generation of school students was brought up to regard as the norm, taking a celebrated episode of political and constitutional history and setting out to re-evaluate it by reading a broader and deeper collection of sources for it than ever before, in both local and national archives.

William Harrison was a prominent Elizabethan intellectual, best known for his ‘Description of Britain’, included in the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587).

The near-simultaneous appearance of the three works under review reveals much about the present state of publications devoted to Antisemitism and the Nazi persecution and mass-murder of European Jewry. Virtually any serious bookstore now boasts a whole section devoted to the Holocaust, filled with books targeting almost any type of reader. For better or for worse, genocide sells.

The conventional textbook treatment of the continental Reformation reflects the tremendous impact of the sixteenth century’s two theological giants, Martin Luther and Jean Calvin.

The reign of Edward IV, as Jonathan Hughes points out, is unique in English history; it was the first – and last – time a king of England lost his throne, went into exile, invaded his own kingdom and regained his crown, enabling him to destroy his rivals and to reign in relative peace and tranquillity for another thirteen years.

Wars of religion, for so long an embarrassment to humanist agendas within the academy, have suddenly become relevant again.

This volume is dedicated to Barrie Dobson, whose work over four decades on the peculiar clerical institutions and communities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been a model of scholarship, broad vision and human sympathy.

Despite a certain academic heaviness, with no fewer than fifty-seven pages of notes, bibliography and index, and despite an occasionally disagreeable academic vocabulary, of which more anon, this book has a pleasantly simple knock-down argument, that Christianity in Britain enjoyed a long nineteenth century of prosperity, between 1800 and 1960, and only began to go into terminal decline in the